License plate readers used to record attendees at political rallies

Heeding the demands of the Secret Service, state police in Virginia recorded and collected the whereabouts of potentially millions of people in an effort to monitor attendees at political rallies in 2008 and 2009.

Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request
filed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the Virginia state
capital show that police agencies utilized license plate readers
in order to record information about people traveling to at least
three politically-charged events during the 2008 presidential
election season.

According to the documents obtained by the paper, Virginia State
Police logged license plate data for every vehicle leaving the
state en route to neighboring Washington, DC during President
Barack Obama’s first inauguration ceremony in January 2009. Three
months earlier, the police ran a similar operation to coincide
with campaign rallies in Leesburg, Virginia being held by
then-candidate Obama and Sarah Palin, the Republican Party’s
nominee for vice president.

Mark Bowes, a reporter with The Dispatch, wrote that the United
States Secret Service directed state police to use a license
plate reader positioned at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA to
“to capture and store the plate images as an extra level of
security for the inauguration.” Similar requests were made
for the preceding rallies outside of DC, he reported.

The Dispatch has not published information about how many
vehicles had their location recorded and logged, but Bowes noted
that an estimated 1.8 million people attended Pres. Obama’s
inauguration in Jan. 2009.

How much of that information still exists, if any, remains a
mystery, however. In February, Virginia Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli authorized legislation forcing the state police to
stop storing data in a “passive matter,” and intelligence
is now erased after 24 hours unless investigators believes it’s
relevant to an ongoing criminal case. When Cuccinelli made that
directive in February, it impacted the information from roughly 8
million license plates scanned over the span of 2010 through
early 2013. Bailey McCann wrote for CivSource online, though,
that the data is likely still accessible since it was collected
per the orders of the Secret Service, the federal law enforcement
agency that provides security detail for US presidents and other
persons of high-importance and serves as a function of the
Department of Homeland Security.

The Dispatch’s revelation comes amid growing concerns of
federal-ordered surveillance within the US, as well as a recent
report from the American Civil Liberties Union detailing how law enforcement agencies across
America are increasingly relying on license plate scanners as a
crime-fighting tool. But despite proponents of the technology
calling the devices instrumental in finding criminal suspects and
stole vehicles, scanners like the ones used in Virginia have
raised a number of privacy questions from the likes of the ACLU
and others.

“At first the captured plate data was used just to check
against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various
reasons,” ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote in July
when her non-partisan group published their profile on the
scanners. “But increasingly, all of this data is being fed
into massive databases that contain the location information of
many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or
even years.”

“As it becomes increasingly clear that ours is an era of mass
surveillance facilitated by ever cheaper and more powerful
computing technology, it is critical we learn how this technology
is being used,” Crump wrote. “License plate readers are
just one example of a disturbing phenomenon: the government is
increasingly using new technology to collect information about
all of us, all the time and to store it forever – providing a
complete record of our lives for it to access at will.”

Claire Gastañaga, the executive director of the ACLU of Virginia,
told The Dispatch that she found recording information pertaining
to attendees of political rallies “pretty astounding.”

“It’s a situation where you’re collecting a lot of information
on a lot of people to potentially use if something bad happens at
some unspecified future time and some unspecified situation,”
Gastañaga said. According to her, that reasoning “would
justify a camera on every street corner recording all of our
movements at all times, because it would be expedient to be able
to have that to refer back to if there’s a bank robbery there two
years from now.”

As RT reported last month, DC’s Metropolitan Police
Department currently has over 300 cameras that can be used to
record car and pedestrian traffic on city roadways, and the
department is currently pushing on a way that will allow more
city cops the ability to monitor those video feeds in real-time.